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A New Linux OpenGL ABI Is Being Proposed

09-13-2012, 12:00 PM

Phoronix: A New Linux OpenGL ABI Is Being Proposed

The Linux OpenGL stack along with the upstream OpenGL specification has been evolving at a fast pace in recent years. There was recently some discussion within the Khronos camp for updating the guide for how to implement OpenGL support on Linux and it's been decided it will be talked about next week at XDC2012. To get the ball rolling for planning out a new Linux OpenGL ABI, NVIDIA has published a proposal...

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Can someone explain if and what benefits are to be expected for users once this is implemented?

It's not for users, it's for developers.

When Intel killed a lot of old crap from Mesa including XAA and unmaintained drivers they didn't do it for the users. Same here - it is for the developers to be easier to properly/easier setup a system and program for it - which in the long run greatly benefits the users.

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I don't really know where you guys got the impression that this benefits developers only. The article clearly states that it's a benefit for software vendors and users.

It will benefit users in being possible for multiple 3D drivers to coexist in the same filesystem. I can imagine for instance having the intel opensource stack coexisting with fglrx and being able to select the default driver to use for applications. Meaning I can select which GPU I want to run an application on.
You should also be able to have both nVidia hardware and AMD hardware in the same machine and select which app runs on which GPU.

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It will benefit users in being possible for multiple 3D drivers to coexist in the same filesystem. I can imagine for instance having the intel opensource stack coexisting with fglrx and being able to select the default driver to use for applications. Meaning I can select which GPU I want to run an application on.
You should also be able to have both nVidia hardware and AMD hardware in the same machine and select which app runs on which GPU.

I was under the impression that we could do this already via eselect-opengl under Gentoo, and that the benefit of the new/proposed ABI is that it would allow us to run two GL applications simultaneously on two different mfrs' cards.

I guess that we all might be a little confused regarding the implications of the proposal, and that it will be made clearer at XDC.

I'm really not 100% convinced yet that the proposal benefits anyone other than the developers of proprietary GL drivers.

F

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This has nothing to do with it. If you eselect another GL library, all applications will use that. You can't have both; eselect simply selects one of several alternatives, it doesn't activate them simultaneously.

These aren't equivalent. GLUT is like a shitty toy version of GTK/Qt. EGL is an OS-neutral version of GLX. GLUT layers over GLX/WGL/AGL/EGL, and offers borderline useless input and timer mechanisms and window management. EGL lets you create and bind GL contexts to a full real windowing system and allows using the native fully featured window system API for input, timers, I/O, events, etc.